What is XNA?

What is XNA? That is a very good question. While XNA is not a programming language, XNA is a game development huge class library. By using the classes that are stored in the XNA namespaces, any games from 2D to 3D to RPG to RTS are in reach. Microsoft has really outdone themselves by enabling the easy ability to create games using XNA.

Some may think that XNA was built off of managed DirectX. Well, even though XNA shows many similarities between DirectX, XNA was built completely from scratch. Also, unlike managed DirectX, XNA does not require any device creation! This saves tons of time when trying to learn the boring stuff and not even seeing any results.

Finally, it is useful to mention that XNA was made for the C# programming language, and to my knowledge does not fully support any other languages. However, I am not sure if it supports Visual Basic or not. I program in C#, but if you love Basic, I recommend searching to see if XNA is supported in that language. I do know though that there is a wonderful XNA community and forum at http://creators.xna.com/. This community uses the C# language (there is section that uses C++, but this section talks about DirectX and not XNA).